


MerMay 2020 collection

by RTJipper (Who_First)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Canon Non-Binary Character, Gen, MerMay, MerMay 2020, Mermaids, Morally Ambiguous Character, Multi, Natural Disasters, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, evil mermaids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:01:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24029296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Who_First/pseuds/RTJipper
Summary: A collection of 1K~ drabbles using the MerMay 2020 prompts. More warnings and descriptions for individual chapters
Kudos: 3





	1. Prompt 5: Royalty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diplomacy and the importance of pronouns

Much like on the surface, under the sea was filled with kingdoms and political intrigue. There would be enough political machinations to please any surface Machiavellian. Perhaps even more, given the different sea kingdoms were made up of different species as well as cultures. 

Alright. Anthropologists, lawyers, and politicians would all be pleased to be in the position of a diplomat to one of the ocean kingdoms. Nico was pretty sure he had been sent because someone wished him dead. That’s what happened with diplomats sent to the Seahorse kingdom near the Australian Gold coast. 

Nico hadn’t checked the exact numbers, he did not want to know the betting odds for his survival, but that hadn’t stopped any of the others in his diplomatic party letting him know just how bad it would be. 

In the past five years, Altia had excitedly informed him back on the surface, 13 diplomats or members of the diplomatic party that had entered the kingdom of Hippocampia had turned up dead.

Of course they were all terrible accidents.

Altia had looked even more excited when she talked about Nico’s immediate predecessor who had somehow gotten caught up in the kelp forest and accidently had his protective breathing mask ripped off by a passing kraken. Of course Nico had known Louis Frigettin well. 

His death had probably been the only true accident on the list. 

Nevertheless. Currently Nico was not quite 20,000 leagues under the sea, but trying to calmly wait for his escorts to bring him into the royal meeting room. Was it called the royal meeting room? Something else? Suddenly every bit of research he had done when assigned the posting seemed to slip away in a panic. 

The two Campiamers, who were also heavily armed guards and much larger than Nico, knocked on the metal like doors before waiting patiently for the guards on the inside of the well protected room to open them. 

The doors trembled, or the water surrounding them trembled, as they were slowly pushed open from inside. Despite what his few friends would have delighted in, the doors did not creak like something from a horror movie, nor did Nico feel his soul leave his body in apprehension. His milky skin did curdle a bit more, but he would be taking that fact to his watery grave if needed. 

“Their Royal Majesty, Leader of Hippocamia, Protector of the…”

And perhaps his apprehension was enough to make it difficult to make out the individual words his escort spoke, the long diplomatic title Nico was not exactly in possession of but would be speaking on behalf of, but…

“Leader Elisaran, we bring from the surface a diplomat in your honor.”

“Your majesty,” Nico remembered this bit, bowing lowly and awkwardly in this thick water surrounding him. “It is my pleasure to be here, may my time here be useful for all.”

The words weren’t quite right, but close enough for diplomatic work, they still echoed the ideal behind the pretty words. Pretty words, Nico really wished that he was better with words, or at least better about holding his tongue before his words were released from his throat. 

“It is our pleasure to meet you Diplomat Nico Harris. My second child, leader protectorate of our vassals, Canteo is our diplomat.” Elisaran waved to the large male campiamer at her side, motioning the other forwards. “Canteo, I am sure will be pleased to communicate with you and your… superiors.” 

The campiamer looked similar to the guard escorts on either side of Nico, deceptively delicate tail flexing despite muscles tightly bound on the scale and more human skin. Canteo had a deep copper colored tail compared the queen, the human side muscled into a classic hourglass figure with more defined muscles than Nico had seen in any diplomat he’d previously worked with. Of course the lips pulled back from almost fangs and the cold eyes kept Nico from dreaming about admiring the other man.

“Smooth seas be with you.” Elisaran continued as Canteo moved swiftly through the water away from the odd dais. 

“Smooth seas to you as well, your majesty.” Nico returned, bowing again against the odd resistance of the surrounding water. Well he tried to bow, his escorts would easily shoving him along to another doorway just behind the quickly swimming Canteo. 

When they were through the doors, his escorts now closer than ever, Nico got the feeling his opposite diplomat was less than pleased with the circumstances. The guard on his left, who looked female with the over powerful build and less human recognizable features gripped his right arm carefully. 

“Protectorate Canteo?” She asked neutrally. “Shall we escort you?”

“No.” Canteo’s face was bland, but the eyes were hard enough to rival diamonds as they viewed Nico’s suddenly very small feeling form. “Leave us. You may rejoin the diplomat in two hours at the human rooms.”

Both escorts saluted, nothing close to the human salutes Nico was used to, and slowly leaving Nico to his possible demise. Perhaps he was a bit overly concerned, but at an estimate both of Nico’s arms together were smaller than the sleek muscles of one of Canteo’s arms. 

“You have been appraised of your fellows work in Hippocampia?” Canteo didn’t allow the words to become a question. His hair, long and near the same copper color as his tail, floated underneath the long head fins and chained pearls used for jewelry.

“Yes sir.” Nico managed to keep the stutter out of his voice. “I understand there have been accidents. I will be most careful.”

“I suppose you must be.” Canteo’s brows would have been furrowed if he were human, as it was the other’s face was too angled for Nico to be sure, but the voice seemed to growl now. “Follow me. A guard will give you the tour of the public areas later. You are allowed in all public areas as you please, personal areas of the royal family may only be accessed with an escort. The diplomatic quarters have two parts, a seating area and beyond is a pressurized zone you may drain the water from and use oxygen pumps.”

“Thank you, I-“

“The official meeting will take place in two and a half human hours. Your escorts will retrieve you before then and escort you to the proper room.”

“Thank you again.” Nico managed, already breathless as he tried to keep up with the swift movements of the other through the corridors. “I do have questions, I would like to be of use to both your kingdom and my own.”

“Keep your sentiments to yourself,” Canteo swiveled back, still seeming to move at speed, while Nico floundered to a halt. “Your people have done little to show that your ‘kingdom’ is worth a treaty. I fail to see you being able to change that. You should be more concerned with yourself. Do not have an accident.”

The threat was there, more obvious than many of the threats Nico or his fellow diplomat minions had received in the past, and if Nico had managed to miss the threat. Well for a campiamer, Canteo had teeth more suited to barracuda. 

This was when Nico’s curiosity surged, and as Altia would gleefully phrase, left his common sense behind in another kingdom.

“Protectorate Canteo,” Nico didn’t so much as pause and take a deep breathe from his protective oxygen unit, wondering if it would be his last. It’s just, well he did read the suddenly ended reports they had from previous diplomats. “Before I make more errors, do you have a preferred pronouns?”

Canteo stopped, only his tail whipping back and forth to keep the campiamer in place moved, and Nico wondered if he might make a new record for quickest tragic accident.  
Despite the perfect opportunity for another threat, or an attack, Canteo stayed silent and watchful. Nico proceeded fill in the space empty of words with his own. 

“I was looking over my previous diplomats reports,” Nico stammered as the dark alien eyes watched him like a cat watched a particularly dumb mouse. “My friend, coworker and I, wondered if campiamer consider-have the same genders humans do?”

Another long look, slightly less threatening but still filled with grinning teeth, a bit more assessing glance. One that actually made Nico’s stomach drop.

“Perhaps you will be a better fit for diplomat.” Canteo twisted as easily as anything born to water. “I’ll show you to your quarters.”


	2. Prompt 6: Tsunami

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a Lorelei in the town of Isolt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for referenced natural disaster and death.

There’s a legend of the Lorelei, a lovely woman sitting on the rocks of the Rhine singing to the passing sailors far below. From there the legend differs. There is the nice version, one that would make a lovely Disney movie for young children with rose tinted vision, where the Lorelei sings softly and gently to all that pass. Songs of happiness, inspiration, love, and hope. The kind of stories and songs that could make a generation believe in the magic of a lovely woman with a fish tail. 

There were other stories of course. Ones not fit for children. There was the story that the Lorelei had been a woman who had thrown herself to her death after her shipboard love never returned. Another said she was thrown from the cliff rocks by her lover when they tired of her. Still more stories spoke of other unhappy and tragic reasons behind her fate.

But a Lorelei is just a name for a creature with a lovely voice found on the cliff sides of rivers.

And similar creatures do not always have similar goals.

The town of Isolt is located in a picturesque valley surrounded on three sides by mountains. The third side was taken up by a large lake turned river winding it’s way between the mountains until it continued through the town and beyond. 

In all honestly it was similar to many other mountainous towns. Beautiful, idyllic, and boring to the point many of the residents went out into the world only to come back in tears when the world proved to harsh and depressing. 

The only difference to other towns was the Lorelei. 

No one knew where she had come from nor where she lived, though people wasted much time trying to answer those questions, to no avail. All they knew for certain was that she had shown up in the singing one day at the lake. 

Drina had been the one to first call her the Lorelei, her younger twin siblings Tonyo and Teena had been some of the first to see the otherworldly figure, and they were happy to tell their newly returned from university sister all about the singing naked lady. 

Drina had been very excited to hear the description and immediately set out the next day to see the figure for herself. Studying world mythology and the way it affected how humans viewed other species at her university had been one of her few joys. The chance to meet a non-human had her heartbeat thudding faster and harder than a normal day made it. 

It didn’t take too long to reach the lower part of the lake where everyone had said the creature sat. She was a native and new all the routes to get there quickly. The lake and surroundings was beautiful, crystal clear and as still as glass.

There was an outcropping of aged and waterworn boulders just past the shore that one could climb from the water if one were in decent shape and determined enough. Drina had never managed to climb them from lake or land.

Instead of focusing her entire attention on the boulders, a watched pot never boils and all that, she had a lovely day exploring the edges of the lake. A few hours were lost to   
contemplation as she wrote and sketched in her journal, and another deciding whether or not the berries next to her were edible. 

What she didn’t see was anything out of the ordinary. Anything at all. 

It was just a lake surrounded by mountains, the same lake and the same mountains Drina had seen over and over during twenty years. 

Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, quickly blinked away, as Drina accepted that whatever her sisters and other townspeople had seen, she would not be seeing. It took breathing slow and repetition that she could return and try again. She wouldn’t be the only person that missed seeing the creature that sang on the boulders. 

Following the route back to town, which stayed close to the river, allowed Drina to keep her hope of hearing an otherworldly song a bit longer.

The night however was filled with interrogating her sisters again on what they had seen, and then her father and aunt as well when they mentioned hearing a song while fishing the day before. And when Teena listed off other townspeople she knew to have seen or heard the mysterious woman Drina made plans for the following day.

With her sisters and her best friend Loons’ help, Loon’s family was enamored with bird and all of his siblings were named after different species, they slowly made their way through the town. All possible were asked if they had heard or seen the woman in the lake, what they had been doing when they did, and how often they might have. 

Drina had internalized the lessons learned from her classes quite well. 

It didn’t help. In fact the results from her family, friends, and neighbors of Isolt were more confusing and irritating than it had been looking and finding nothing in the lake above the village.

Most of the town had seen or heard something. There was perhaps less than twenty people that had seen and heard nothing. And among those people, Drina wasn’t the only one to have gone looking for the lady. Nor did she stop looking. 

She never saw a flash of the bright red hair her sister’s gossiped about, or heard a peel of the sweet and said song her next door neighbor tried to recreate for her. After ten days Drina was prepared to take a break, her father was happy to allow her to take the families’ old truck down from Isolt’s protected slopes to the closet big city some three hours away for the months’ order of supplies. Given how long the drive was and how precarious the part of entering Isolt was, Drina’s father was happy to give her additional money to find a hotel room for the night.

Drina wasn’t as happy when Tonyo called, with Teena shrieking in the background, saying that the Lorelei was singing and it was more beautiful than ever before. Like the soft bells of a wind chime with gentle sounds of nature and the steady pull of a river. Beautiful and natural.

Drina went to bed trying not to cry about the unfairness of it.

Two weeks after the first person of Isolt, old lady Hallis who made the best cheese buns which she gave out to the youngest children, heard the lovely and mournful song on the breeze there was a long silence. One that at three am when all of Isolt were abed asleep was broken by a noise that cracked and echoed like a gunshot. 

A few people stirred at the noise, one so out of the ordinary, but most simply slept through it even as the Lorelei’s song drifted gently along the breeze.

When Drina returned late the following afternoon, the song was gone and so was the town of Isolt. 

Rescue services and professionals later said a cornice of snow and rock high up one of the peaks beside the lake and broken away. Several tons of mountain had tumbled down into the glass lake above Isolt all at once. 

A tsunami had raced down the river in the early hours and destroyed Isolt while most of the town slept to a mournful dirge. Only five people survived in a town of more than seven hundred survived. The other eleven, including Drina, had been outside the town and well out of reach of the calm lake turned avenging fury.

There is another creature, one still identified as a lovely woman, who would sing to those who needed it. Now dear reader I have a riddle for you.

What is the difference between a Lorelei and a Banshee?


	3. Prompt 7: Tranquility

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tranquility is a storm at Point Nemo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for barely described and alluded to violence and death at sea

There is a philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, who once wrote the line ‘Hell is other people’ in a play. Now the meaning of his words has often been argued and debated.   
In this case perhaps it was more accurate to say ‘hell is other people who do not know of you to care’. 

Ian wasn’t a philosopher. If someone mentioned the famous quote to him at that exact moment, he would have missed it. Ian was, at that exact moment, leaning over the side of the boat and trying desperately to hold while every meal in the past few years exited through his mouth. 

For a place in the middle of nowhere ocean the waves were uncomfortably rough. 

Below the waves, out of sight of humans’ ant their nosy ship, it was rather tranquil. 

Qitni, who also answered to a series of clicks and moans translating to ‘orange-finned-dark-tailed-stalker-of-prey’, had been doing exactly as his name mentioned. Slowly stalking the human vessel that had prowled into his waters and ignoring all territory markings and scents. 

The fought for this territory had been anything but tranquil, despite the occasional crashes of surface junk, it was as far as one could get from the humans. It made for highly contested territory rights and Qitni was finished with the humans just ignoring his territory lines.

Another human turn of phrase, one a bit better known that Sartre’s, is ‘X marks the spot’. IT doesn’t in fact. Despite the romanticizing of pirates, and x marks the spot to find treasure, only the very petty and those dealing with children made maps using ‘X’ to mark something. 

For example there was no map in existence using ‘X’ to mark the location of Point Nemo. Though to fair, and if Ian wasn’t currently vomiting over the side of the boat, the young redhead would point out there was no map with Point Nemo on it at all.

The point, forgive the joke, was that it was in the middle of nowhere. As far as one could get from other humans. A tranquil spot that world leaders happily used as a landing site for dying bits of spaceships. And if one lived beneath the waves, a highly contested spot of territory, apart from the irritation of random junk splashing down and taking up space. 

The situation, as it was unknown from one side, was about to boil over.

Back up on the ship, or… well back up on the ship followed quickly by down and then up and back down was still ignoring the very clear lack of sea predators that marked the lines of Qitni’s territory. 

Unfortunately the boat, moving that much quicker with the waves, had a profound result on Ian’s stomach as well. The young man was leaning far over the railing to the scientific vessel, too far to really see the way the ocean rose up and ready to snatch the unwary. 

The rest of the shipboard humans were inside, holed up away from where the storm could reach them, and never heard the sudden bitten off shriek and splash.

Only two individuals noticed that a body had been swept overboard. And one of the two was currently trying to breathe in the ocean. 

It was with that final insult that Qitni struck. Armed with a spear made from the odd material that dropped from the sky every few years, and spines of a poisonous fish he traded for from northern cousins, Qitni shot passed the pathetically wriggling form. 

Spear held at the ready, Qitni’s teeth bared in a vicious grin, slashing with the spear before it sunk into the too delicate hull of the boat. Between the strong metal meant to survive the vacuum of space and the strength of a serpentine merman traveling at near 35 knots, the hull peeled apart from the slashing blade like butter on a hot day.

Another slash from Qitni’s spear sent the disgusting viscous and deadly oil spilling into the sea like the guts from a large fish, sent him swimming away quickly to avoid the explosion coming seconds later. 

Above the surface the dark and stormy sky was lit by fire travel along an oil slick seconds before the SS Ermentrude exploded with nearly all hands aboard perishing instantly.   
Watching from below, there was a moment where the small scientific ship was wreathed in a halo of fire, then the ship was gone. Pieces left behind, ones slowly slipping forever below the surface, as the fire spluttered between raging on the surface. 

The explosion also sent the one living crew member of the ship underwater, shoved like a giant hand had slapped him under the waves before he could get a good breath. Ian struggled and swam for all his worth, hands clawing at the surrounding water, until his head popped above the waves. Trying to keep above the waves was another difficulty all together. 

Perhaps one of the few bright, and not aflame points, was that the explosion threw jagged pieces of wood spiraling across the ocean. One of which landed close enough Ian could see it bobbing in the harsh waves.

At the same time the explosion echoed under the water, spiraling outwards at a rate unheard of above the waves, and it took a moment for Qitni to shrug off the echoing noise and smug adrenaline to focus on the one surface object still splashing about. 

Rapidly kicking legs and a flailing arms tried to cut through the waves to little avail. Qitni watched in interest, and irritation, as the moving form fought the waves to reach a piece of wreckage. Slowly swimming upwards, just enough to slowly rise and circle around the human trying so hard not to become one with the sea, Qitni watched carefully. 

It was pathetic. 

Flailing like a new merperson shoved into the fast deep sea currents for the first time with little instruction. Qitni twisted, the movement sending him within touching distance of the human if he stretched, to better examine the surface breather. Perhaps not so pathetic as those first current swimmers, the human did seem to be trying to find something to keep itself afloat. 

For a solitary merman, one of a predatory serpent breed, Qitni was slow to anger and quick to please. Once his anger exploded he felt little preceding rage. In this case he felt curiosity more than anything else. 

Well. He supposed it was time to put the poor creature out of its misery. One way or another.


End file.
